Arthur Sulzberger, owner, chairman and publisher of the NY Times is talking about the impact the Internet has had on his paper. With their somewhat recent website redesign, the owner shows the Times’ seriousness about going online and leaving print behind. Below is a quote from the article at Haaretz.com:
“I really don’t know whether we’ll be printing the Times in five years, and you know what? I don’t care either,” he says.
Sulzberger is focusing on how to best manage the transition from print to Internet.
“The Internet is a wonderful place to be, and we’re leading there,” he points out.
The Times, in fact, has doubled its online readership to 1.5 million a day to go along with its 1.1 million subscribers for the print edition.
Hopefully this will help people begin to see that the Internet and doing business online should be taken seriously because investing in the future is not a bad thing but a smart decision.
Unfortunately they’ve made a major mistake in alienating a lot of online readers by signing a deal with Microsoft to distribute their paper through a program called Times Reader. I guess I’m out of luck being a Mac user who doesn’t have a new Mac Book (and not planning on getting one anytime soon). Anyway, it’s an interesting read about how the Internet has changed the business model of a large, corporate newspaper.
My name’s Jen; I’m a cynical, sarcastic, ex-drummer who is fond of dark humor. I've held way too many factory & retail jobs but finally found my calling one Christmas holiday in a dark, musty basement. I am now a CSS & XHTML web standards looney and can be found daily—when I’m not at my Mac—at the local fair-trade coffee shop buying an iced-soy mocha no matter the temperature.
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Plus, as the article points out, subscription to the print edition is going down and the Internet is going up. So it seems it’s also about demand.
One really positive point about all this is the environmental impact it would have.
As much as I love what the Internet has done for communications… I might have the be the old stodger here and protest the thought that The Times might not print anymore in 5 years. I love the smell of newsprint in the morning!
But how much longer can the prohibitive costs of printing a huge daily newspaper be justified? The Catch-22 of our time.